François Kollar, un ouvrier du regard

As part of the exhibition "Les métiers d'art dans les photographies de François Kollar", the Bibliothèque Forney invites you to discover the career of one of the leading professionals of French photography in the 1930s-1950s.

Born in Szenc, now located in Slovakia, François Kollar arrived in Paris in 1924. Initially employed as a metal turner at Renault, in 1927 he began a professional career in the printing and advertising trades before setting up his own photographic studio in Paris.

A first commission entitled La France travaille marked a turning point in his career: the resulting books (1931-1934) published by Éditions Horizons de France contain around two thousand of his photographs documenting industry and craftsmanship.

His extensive network of contacts enabled him to take on commissions for haute couture (Lanvin, Chanel, Hermès), the illustrated press (L’Illustration, Harper’s Bazaar, Vu) and publishing houses.

After the war, he worked for the State to illustrate investment in the industrial development of French West Africa (Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire), as well as the birth of air freight with the workshops of Union aéromaritime des transports.

Ten years after the retrospective at the Jeu de Paume, which highlighted the François Kollar collections held by the Bibliothèque Forney and the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, this talk provides an opportunity to look back at the career of one of the leading professionals in French photography from the 1930s to the 1950s.

• Speaker Matthieu Rivallin spent the majority of his career at the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie (MPP), first as a photographic collections manager (where he was notably in charge of the Kollar collection), then as deputy curator before becoming head of the photography department in 2024.

As an inspector and advisor for artistic creation (ICCEAAC), he works on collecting photographers' archives at the MPP, has curated around twenty exhibitions and authored numerous catalogues.